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The Great American Desert. Share full article. Sept. 30, 1866. Credit... The New York Times Archives. See the article in its original context from September 30, 1866, Page 6 Buy Reprints.

TO the ordinary air traveler winging across the U.S. Southwest, the great American desert still seems an arid and forbidding waste of sand, dry lake beds and jagged rock mountains.

Three centuries later, the area was still marked on maps as the Great American Desert. Yet in the 1860s pioneers decided in earnest to turn this near-desert into productive farmland.

Once again the Wild West is brought to the stage, this time via Joel Oppenheimer's comedy about three cowboys traveling through the desert of the Great Plains. At the outset, the audience has ...

This article was originally published with the title “ The Migration of the Great American Desert ” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 42 No. 17 (April 1880), p. 256 doi:10.1038 ...

November’s Great Books discussion will cover Terese Svoboda’s “Ogallala Aquifer” from her 2019 collection “Great American Desert.” Dr. Ryan Brooks, associate professor of English, will ...